cimorene

for me the poetic act of creating a story is in a sense symbolic and deliberate. all art itself is by its existence about life as a continual struggle to create reality into art.

art is a chaos, but it is order too. it is assertion, the power to make anything mean anything else, to make those identifications palpably true to other people. the ideal function of the poet is to touch other people, the parts of them that recognize radical epiphanic meanings; the parts of them that grapple with the blinding raw stuff of reality, that constantly strive to build internally sensible things with it, as straight-walled castles with dry sand.

*the term 'poet' is used, in frye and here, to mean any writer of fiction; 'poetry' is literature; a 'poem' is a work of literature. you notice we have no particular, handy word for that.